What is your Story? Intro (more)

What do you want to say?

I believe that instead of justice, revenge leads to the death of innocents and collateral damage.  That, however, is not a particularly popular position.  There is an empathetic charge we all experience watching a story of revenge as justice served up hot and vicious by someone wronged (Liam in Taken(s), Bronson in Death Wish(es), Stallone in everything . . .).

All of those franchises were built on "Revenge over a woman lost", a myth as old as the abduction of Helen.  But unlike the Greek stories, our modern day revenge stories catharsis depend on clear knowledge by the end of the story of who was good and who was evil.  In the Greek myth good and evil were not defined as such and thus revenge as justice often remained ambiguous.

The ambiguity of good and evil in the old Greek myth undermines the catharsis we've come to expect from modern day versions--A man's daughter is kidnapped to be sold into the sex trade forcing him to kick ass and kill with impunity until his little girl is free.  Awesome.

Helen, in the Greek myth, it turns out, was either abducted and/or was a willing accomplice depending on who tells the tale.  Furthermore, Helen was collateral damage herself, a prize given Paris by the goddess Athena as a bribe to ensure he picked Athena as the most beautiful goddess in Olympus.

And never mind Helen was already married to someone else (well, okay someone else purchased her from her father for more gold than anyone else could offer--this is the heritage of the institution of marriage, mind you).  Truthfully, Helen's abduction was simply an excuse for the Greeks to tell the story of a glorious ten year war.

In the end (spoiler alert), the king seeking revenge tricks Helen's abductor with a ruse, a gift, a Trojan Horse, literally, as it were.  Holiday is an updated version of Helen's abduction with all its ambiguity.  More on that another time.